Weekly Crafty: Pumpkins, Paint, & Pantyhose

Oh yeah, this is a weird one guys. I thought it would be fun to get crafty with a bunch of faux pumpkins and gourds that I’ve had for years, along with a few other items that have been tucked away in my craft bin for forever and a day. So all of these quirky little seasonal updates cost me zero dollars (holla!), and it turns out I’m cool with putting legwear on decorative items, so I learned a little bit about myself. Enter three sets of pantyhose, stage left. Or should I technically call them fishnets? Either way, I’ve been thinking about how much fun they’d be to slide around a pumpkin like a spider-web-ish slipcover for years now (I got them on clearance at TJ Maxx in 2011 for this purpose and promptly forgot about them).

While I was at it, I also used some craft paint and a sharpie to give a few old gourds a new look.

Here were all of my materials laid out before I got started. I had sprayed some of the gourds white a bunch of years back and those white faux pumpkins hailed from Michael’s before we even started this blog I think (I like using them in fall/Thanksgiving decor too since they’re pretty versatile, so I didn’t want to permanently do anything to alter them, like paint them with Halloween-specific things – which is why the fishnets are such a nice update). Let’s call them temporary tattoos, if you will. Except they’re a new breed that can be removed and reused every year around Halloween.

This was such a simple project that only took a few minutes per faux pumpkin. I just slipped the pumpkin carefully into one of the legs and tried to squish it as close to the foot part as I could. Pardon this next sentence (possibly the weirdest one I have typed to date) but in case you can’t tell what’s going on here, the pumpkin went in at the top of the pantyhose where the crotch is, and I pushed it down one leg as close to the toe as I could get it.

Then I just cut the pantyhose off off at the bottom of the pumpkin (so it was long enough to wrap around under it and stay put) and I clipped it off at the top. Thanks to the shrinky nature of pantyhose, even though I cut off the entire foot area of the fishnets, they sort of shrunk up around the stem, as you can see below. I did two exactly the same way using two different fishnet varieties (they were $1.99 each from TJ Maxx when I grabbed them two years back if anyone is wondering what they might cost to buy).

Here’s a closer shot from the top so you can really see how the stockings hug the pumpkin and sort of snuggle the stem so there’s not a big band of white up there or anything (just try to press the pumpkin in as far as it can go and cut off as little as possible of the stockings because obviously if you snipped them off at the thigh there would be a lot more of a hole and it wouldn’t hug your pumpkin as tightly and look as fitted up around the stem).

I think the diamond one’s my favorite.

The white fishnets are sort of subtle and even more real-life-spiderweb-ish. I think they’d be really cool on a chalkboard pumpkin or even a bold orange one if you want a little more contrast, but a black and white palette like this is fun too. Oh and I did two of the gourds with the small foot sections that I had snipped off, which are somewhat cute, but I’m not as in love with them as the big ones (when the fabric is tighter around the pumpkins I think it’s a little bit cooler of an effect).

Update: Apparently we have been living under a rock, and it turns out fishnet pumpkins are a thing (someone commented to say they were on The Today Show this morning!) – so check out all the fun ones that came up when I googled it.

Now let’s switch gears to my painted gourds. I used craft paint from Michael’s and JoAnn that I already had in my bin and just sort of smeared the yellow and red around with a brush haphazardly to give one of those previously white ones an orange and smeary look.

I did the same thing to the pear shaped gourd, and then just painted the smaller pumpkin and the goose-necked one solid yellow. After those dried I went back with some orangey-red paint and created some bands around each of them (two on all of them except for that squat little pumpkin, who just got one wide one around the top).

See that red sharpie in the picture above? Well, once they dried I took them outside (sharpies in the house = stinky, and I’m paranoid that they make Burger high) and doodled on each of the yellow bands around all four of them. I did some triangle doodles on the pear-shaped one, some diamonds on the long spiney one, and some stripes on the squat pumpkin and the goose-necked one.

They’re definitely far from perfect (my hand wiggled a few times since they’re not exactly like drawing on a flat surface) but I think the word “doodles” perfectly describes them.

I like that I can just spray paint them all gold or white (or any other color) if I so desire, but for now I’m digging the happier orange and yellow look. And my fishnet stockings make me feel like a woman who puts pantyhose on fake vegetables. Me-ow. Most of all, Clara loves all things bug, so the spiderweb-y slipcovers are definitely a hit with her. I think I might even grab some of those creepy rubber spiders and set them on top of each pumpkin, just to see the sheer joy on her face when she discovers them. What are you guys getting crafty with this week? Any other pumpkin related updates? Are you carving real ones? We grabbed some of those too, and can’t wait to find a night to carve them.

Looking for more seasonal craftiness? Here are 22 other fall/Halloween/Thanksgiving projects that we’ve tackled over the years:

We haven’t finished our pumpkins yet, as family came for a visit and then we had a busy weekend of clamming. (My awesome husband even found a “sonnet of sand dollars” for me while he was clamming in the dark!)

We did, however, have some fun exploring spider webs and making a school out of them! Lots of awesome learning and more to come!

Love your Halloween ideas! I tried to do the tape/finger painting pumpkin with our 13-month old this weekend, and once the paint dried, it all shriveled up and fell off! Did you spray with the sealer before the paint dried? Or does my paint just stink?

I’m a preschool director and sometimes paint doesn’t stick to pumpkins if if it’s tempera paint. Craft paints (not as familiar with these in a preschool setting) and acrylics (acrylics are more permanent so beware!) tend to stick to pumpkins better. (:

Wow – you always come up with the most creative ideas! I never would have seen those pantyhose in the store and thought of that, but they turned out really cute! And being able to re-use those pumpkins for Thanksgiving easily is an extra bonus :)

I agree on the creative ideas! And thanks for posting a little round up of them at the end. That was a great resource/trip down memory lane (I bet for you, too!) We haven’t done anything with our pumpkins yet, but here’s my latest fall craft–a super easy (cheater) pillow–made from a place mat!http://lovinghere.com/place-mats-and-pillows-the-perfect-fall-project/

How cute! I would never have thought to dress my pumpkins in fishnets… interesting how your mind works. :)

The kids and I just made these monsters out of toilet paper rolls… not very fancy, but it was exciting since I had everything on hand. And the kids were happy too – they are a little TOO obsessed with monsters.

Very cool. We are big fishnet fans at my house (actually we are big Rocky Horror Picture Show fans, the fishnets just go along with that) so those would be perfect décor for us! I wonder how it would look if you spray painted the pumpkins with the hosiery on them, let it dry and then remove? That is actually what I thought you did at first to the gourds.

I love the pantyhose pumpkins! That’s such a great idea! Love the other Halloween decorations too. In our little country Halloween is slowly gaining popularity, but it’s still not common to decorate for it like you guys do. I tend to do a little decorating, but we won’t be home till the 31th. Still, those pumpkins will be a nice decoration for November (no Thanksgiving here either) too, I think.

This reminds me of a method I saw to paint Easter eggs. Wrap lace around the egg and then paint it and remove the lace and you will be left with the lace pattern. You could paint the pumpkins and remove the stockings to see the pattern in any color you want.

Love this! I’ve seen it around and I actually just did the same thing on Sunday with a real pumpkin I’m not ready to carve! The black and orange look cute together, but I really like the white pumpkins though! And the white on white is very subtle and elegant… Way to go! Keep the seasonal crafts coming!

(I have funky fishnets that I was saving as well, but they were anklets, so I didn’t have to cut anything – I just tied them in a bow at the back of the pumpkin and stuck the stem through one of the “nets”.)

I kind of jumped the gun and scrolled to see how the pumpkins looked after the spray paint dried! Of course, I remember spray paint is a no-go for now, but do you suppose that would work? A really light pass over the hose, let it dry, and take off the hose?

We did some pumpkin painting around here, too, although the Kaeslets wielded the paintbrushes (http://kaesey.wordpress.com/2013/10/16/punkins/). I’m waiting until the 30th to tackle our big pumpkin. It lives inside and I don’t want it to rot!

I’ve seen the fishnet hose thing all over pinterest…is that where you originally saw it too? Just curious if your craft ideas are original, borrowed or a mixture of both? No criticism at all, just curious.

Check out the post update I added about 5 minutes into publishing this! I honestly had no idea it was a thing (and even mentioned that I had bought these fishnets from TJ Maxx a few years back to do it but forgot about them) but a commenter said they were on The Today Show this morning and I googled and there they were! I haven’t checked Pinterest yet, but I’d love to see ’em! In response to if our ideas are original, I’d guess that over 99.9% have been done by someone else – probably better/cheaper/cooler than ours! I think the world is too big to have any idea be one of a kind anymore. Here’s a post I wrote about that a while back.

xo
s

p.s. Whenever we see something somewhere and do our take on it, we love sharing the link love (like we’ve done here, and here, and here, and for all of our Pinterest challenges, etc) so you’ll see a big ol’ shout out to whoever inspired us when that happens :)

I think you do a good job of crediting. It was more fun when you put in pics, links are not likely to be clicked on by me anyway, so sometimes it “looks” like you didn’t give credit.

I am a little surprised that once you thought of the idea, you didn’t go to pinterest or google and see other takes on the idea. Thats just what most people do when they start a project – they want to see what other people have done. It’s a natural assumption that somebody with a home blog is checking Pinterest. But the pumpkins are still cute, don’t despair! You did a good job.

Thanks KatieLou! Whenever we’re stuck on something we might google around and check Pinterest for ideas (like we did on Friday for Clara’s canopy) but for small projects where we have materials laying around and already have an idea of what we want to do (like make a fall wreath, stencil a pillow, pumpkin decorating) we don’t typically search for others who have done it just because we already have an idea of what we’d like to do and would rather just dive in.

As for sharing other people’s images, unfortunately we can no longer do that (other than pics that people submit to us, like for Pinterest Challenges or Reader Redesigns) because it’s a legal issue. We mentioned it a while back over here, but bloggers are being sued for using images that aren’t their own, even if they credit them. So we just link over without duplicating the image on our blog to protect ourselves, although it’s definitely a lot less exciting. We’re rule followers to the max!

While checking out previous Halloween décor, I noticed the B/W theme on the console one had the framed capital “P” on the wall. What’s become of that? Even if you never hung it again, you’d still keep it, right?

We had it hanging in our second house in the kitchen (near the fireplace sitting area) and in this house we’ve only hung frames in the living room and foyer, so it’s stacked in the storage room with about 100 other frames, just waiting to be hung! Better get on that!

Very Creative! This is the second or third post where you’ve mentioned using supplies that you just have around. Would you mind posting about keeping craft supplies organized? I find that I stop myself from buying supplies because I feel like they sit in a big pile untouched and I never go through them…would love to hear how you handle long term/accessible storage!

If I posted a picture of my craft closet you’d cry (it’s the one in the guest room so it’s even more mortifying if a guest peeks in there). I’d love to get it organized, but since our move I have a few plastic bins just overflowing with madness and even a paper grocery bag full of stuff. But I’d love to get it under control (maybe by adding shelves, getting clear bins that I can label with what’s in them, etc). Oh man, that sounds like heaven to me. Right now my method is just to dump things out to see what I have and then throw them back into bins and bags when I find what I want to use. It’s not very effective though!

This is geeeenius! I always feel like I will waste a pumpkin’s perfectly good baking potential if I do something like paint it. So I am surrounded by plain pumpkins every fall. This year is different, I’m going shopping for fishnets tonight! Thank you!

That sounds fun! I thought it could be cool to paint them white and then use polka dot stickers or thin tape to make stripes on them and spray them metallic so they could be metallic with white dots or stripes or something. Maybe next year! These gourds will slowly get bigger and bigger with every coat of paint I give them, haha!

Oh Come on. I don’t believe for one minute Sherry that you didn’t know that fishnet pumpkins were “a thing”. It’s okay to use other peoples ideas…but not okay to make it seem like you came up with it….and then later on, pretend that you didn’t know that they existed.

Isn’t linking to a bunch of other fishnet stockings in bold as an update to this post keeping it real (which we did within minutes of learning about them)? I’m drawing attention to them and admitting they’re out there – and why the heck not?! It never hurts to share the love! I like to think that we’re super liberal about linking over to others. We’ve never found that anything but positive things happen from sharing urls of those who are creative and inspiring to us on this little DIY journey of ours. It’s why we do Pinterest Challenges and Reader Redesigns and House Crashing and link out to folks who inspire us at least 5 times a week! Why wouldn’t we have done that if we were aware of other fishnet pumpkins? We even did it when we made bloody candles and other Halloween crafts – and we thought adding an update to this post as soon as we learned of them was a great way to acknowledge them this time around.

I’m the first to admit I’m not always up on the Pinterest stuff (lately I’ve been searching prego/baby stuff and that’s it) so I’m 100% guilty of being out of the loop! Trust me, I wish I was more in the loop to avoid situations like this! Sometimes I feel like I’m the last one to hear about something. But I’d never withhold linking to others to pretend I thought of something – there’s literally nothing to gain from that – and we’ve even written a post about how our ideas are probably never original. The world’s too big for that!

I know Chelsea! If I were the inventor of pantyhose pumpkins I would be so mad that Sherry’s trying to take the credit….. Seriously though, Sherry, I’ve never seen them done before this post and I’m on Pinterest a lot and love decorating for Halloween so thank you for bringing this idea to my attention (even though you didn’t do it first!)

I am living under the same rock, I guess, because I’ve never seen them. I love this idea so much because it takes about 30 seconds and doesn’t involve messy paint. And it’s cute and apparently trendy so I can pretend I’m on the up and up.

Hey, I’m on Pinterest all of the time and have a huge Autumn/Fall board on there, constantly doing searches and looking at the “what’s popular” stuff and I’ve NEVER seen fishnet pumpkins before! I can totally see Sherry thinking, “Hey, lookit these cool stockings/pumpkins, hey, let’s try that out!”

Anyhoo, Sherry, those do look very cool and webby! Love ’em! And I personally think it’s kind of cool how “on trend” you are without even knowing it! :-D

And I keep looking for the next Pinterest challenge because it will be my first with y’all! Can’t wait!

I’ve seen the pantyhose pumpkin thing on Pinterest and other blogs, but I like seeing Sherry’s take on it too. :-) So many pantyhose patterns keep it interesting even if it’s “been done.” I love seeing the pumpkins you guys do every year. :-)

I love that! Full circle pumpkin decorating! I’m sure you know that’s an auto submission process (the plug-in puts the button up) and as much as we love soaking as many up as we can, with hundreds of them coming in at a time, I don’t get to check them all out (number 716 would have come in a few days after that post went up when I was writing/moderating other posts – if you click it you’ll see her blog post wasn’t even published until the day after the Pinterest Challenge link-up). It was also labeled “fancy pumpkins” so even if my eye caught it, that small thumbnail looks like it could be lace or decoupage or black spray paint/marker to me, so I don’t know that I would have absorbed that it was fishnet stockings. I would have loved to link up to a former Pinterest Challenger in this post, so I’m sad I missed it!

I know there will be people who believe me and people who think I’m full of it, but I’m all about link love. Friday’s canopy post had links to tons of inspiration, and last week’s Weekly Crafty had links to other painted baskets – I just honestly don’t see/absorb/remember every project people submit for Pinterest Challenges (there have been over 5,000 submitted to date!) and I must not have stared at that box long enough for it to register (or even seen it at all if it came in days later). Wish I had though! It would have saved me from Pumkin-gate 2013! Haha!

Why is it still surprising that there are people out there who just don’t get what integrity is. You both have shown (over and over) that you have it and to think that you would purposely deceive others is ridiculous…I honestly don’t know why these people read your blog. It is truly one of the reasons I enjoy your blog so much. Humans have been on this planet for a long time and to think that any idea is truly original is simply naive. It doesn’t matter how many times this craft has been done before, your take on it is new, interesting, well written, and easy to follow.

First off, I’m going home today and putting some of these pumpkins together as a thank you gift – I’ve never seen it online (pinterest or otherwise) until you linked to them. So thanks!

I don’t understand why someone would assume you would lie. What would you gain from lying? “keepin’ it real” seems like the new “no offense” after you’ve offended someone. You’re not keeping it real when you’re making assumptions.

Love your fishnet and painted pumpkins! We did pumpkin painting with the babe this year and a little carving as well. But I thought I’d share my favorite pumpkin of all time that I did a few years back. It’s a punk rock pumpkin complete with mohawk, nose ring, and tongue ring. It totally won the contest at my work that year :) Was thinking about trying to recreate it this year! http://ladybuginlove.blogspot.com/2010_10_01_archive.html

Super cute! I’m normally not into small crafty things, but this post is awesome. I was just telling the boyfriend yesterday about how rare it is that I see Halloween decor that isn’t tacky looking… but prove me wrong, you did!

“…and it turns out I’m cool with putting legwear on decorative items, so I learned a little bit about myself.” <– the best

You should have saved that idea for book #2, so cool! When I first looked at them I thought, “No way those are Sherry’s, she wouldn’t wear those!” Then you went on to explain how, why, and when you bought them.